Archaeologists find a cache of 1,000-year-old coins at the site of a future power plant

Researchers in Brazil have uncovered a remarkable discovery that spans across millennia—dinosaur footprints found alongside ancient rock art dating back over 9,000 years. This significant find took place in Serrote do Letreiro, located in the Sousa Basin, and the research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study, led by Leonardo P. Troiano, Heloísa B. dos Santos, Tito Aureliano, and Aline M. Ghilardi, suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Brazil created mysterious rock art designs—known as petroglyphs—next to dinosaur footprints. These findings offer valuable insights into the intersection of paleontology and archaeology, particularly at the Serrote site.

From Stonehenge to the Easter Island statues, scientists continue to be baffled by ancient structures whose origins remain to be a mystery. In a recent discovery about 12.4 miles east of Dijon, France, near the gravel pits of the verdant Ouche valley, relics of ancient life dating back millennia have been unearthed, reported IFL Science.

Representative Image Source: Plant growing in sand (Getty Images)

Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut, was all set to be deployed to the Mir space station on a Soyuz spacecraft in 1991. Set against the backdrop of the Soviet Union's dissolution, the exploratory mission turned out to be a nightmare for the cosmonaut. Initially, marked as a five-month mission, Sergei returned to a changed Earth after almost a year.  

Image source: Russian cosmonaut Sergei K Krikalev seals a set of biomedical samples in the Spacehab module before performing a Bioserve experiment during the mission STS-60. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Twenty years ago, inside a maternity ward at Sutter Maternity Center in Santa Cruz, California, Philippe Kahn’s Toshiba laptop computer sat on a desk alongside a C-section operating table where his wife was going to deliver their baby. Kahn, a French software engineer, also had a Motorola flip phone and a Casio digital camera stacked in his bag. He was nervous as he hadn’t been able to build the prototype he desired. He couldn’t find a way to connect the three things: camera, laptop, and web server. But while his wife, Sonia Lee, spent 18 hours in labor, she gave him an idea. The idea changed the photographic scene of the world forever. That day, on June 11, 1997, Kahn witnessed two births – one of his daughter Sophie and the other of the “world’s first camera phone,” a revolutionary beginning of instant photography, reported IEEE Spectrum.

Image Source: Portrait of Philippe Kahn, from Borland International/Fullpower Technologies, at the annual PC Forum, Palm Springs, California, March 19-22. (Photo by Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images)

Off the western coast of Italy, the Gulf of Pozzuoli in the Tyrrhenian Sea is an underwater museum of ancient ruins, submerged baths, and even remnants of a forgotten city. Its stunning emerald waters, where Roman emperors once bathed, are now home to dolphins and schools of sperm whales gliding through the historic depths. In 2023, archaeologists diving into these waters stumbled upon what appeared to be the remains of a 2,000-year-old Nabataean temple—a site with architectural echoes featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, according to Live Science. Their findings were officially published in Antiquity in September 2024.

The old port of Pozzuoli with boats and bars, Naples (Image Source: Getty Images | Photo Italia LLC)

For hundreds of years, historians and archaeologists believed that Mesopotamia (nearly 3800 BC) was the cradle of civilization. But in the past few years, this belief began to dwindle. In the 1960s, a Russian topographer was going through some aerial photographs of Ukraine when he noticed some unusual shadows materializing on the grounds of Kyiv city. Curious, he magnified the photos and was flabbergasted, as many more concentric circles of these shadows emerged. Further examination revealed that the shadows were cast from unknown archaeological remains that lay buried in the soil. ScienceNews reports that when archaeologists studied these remains, they proposed that the first cities of humanity were built in Ukraine, not Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq). The secret hid in the Trypillia megasites, the forgotten city that mysteriously disappeared.

Representative Image Source: Sumerian reed house. Detail of the Uruk Trough, 3300-3000 BC. Found in the collection of the British Museum. Creator: Sumerian culture. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images)